I feel betrayed by my friends’ flakiness – though I don’t know if I’m being entirely fair.
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Dear Hera,
I am a young person and like many people my age, I’ve spent the past several years bouncing around different Melbourne share houses. Some of those experiences have been wonderful, grounding, and full of connection. Others have been deeply stressful and disappointing. Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about how much our living situations can shape our emotional wellbeing.
Recently, a long-anticipated plan to live with close friends fell apart. For a long time, we’d talked about what it would be like – how we’d make the space our own, the routines we’d build, the comfort of coming home to people who knew me well. I really invested in that shared vision. But circumstances changed, priorities shifted, and they decided to stay where they were for practical reasons. While I understood the logic, I was left scrambling and feeling very alone in the aftermath.
I know that, written plainly, this might sound like “one of those things” that happens in adulthood. But emotionally, it’s been harder than I expected. Housing feels so fundamental – where you live, who you live with, and whether you feel secure there all seem to bleed into every other part of life. I’ve always struggled with the question of whether it’s better to live with close friends and risk strain and disappointment, or live with strangers and protect those friendships at a distance.
Right now, I’m sitting with a mix of anxiety and betrayal, even though I don’t know if that feeling is entirely fair. I’m trying to figure out how to move forward – practically, yes, but also emotionally – without letting this experience harden me or make me fearful of trusting people again.
How do you make peace with plans that don’t work out, especially when they involve people you love? And how do you rebuild a sense of home when the one you imagined disappears?
From,
A very jaded flatter lol
Dear Jaded Flatter,
Every time I get a letter like this, I feel whatever the opposite of nostalgia is. There are a few good things about flatting. Unexpected friendships. Memorable parties. But it’s also fraught with drama, stress and constant fire hazards. Bees nesting inside bedroom walls. Flatmates letting off fireworks inside, or leaving the gas cooker on. The inevitable decay of the communal kitchen.
What you say is true. Who you live with makes a huge difference to your quality of life. But it pays to remember that, for many people your age, a lot of this shit is beyond your control, and depends a lot upon random machinations of fate and financial limitations.
I don’t blame you for wanting to try and exert a sense of control over what can be an insanely hectic and stressful aspect of young adulthood. I’m sorry your dream house didn’t work out. But any kind of communal living situation is fraught with difficulty, especially when you’re relying on the untested organisational skills of a bunch of young, broke people, many of whom are also learning to change a washing machine filter or mop a floor for the first time.
I get that you’re upset with your friends, and understandably stressed about having to make last-minute arrangements. It’s reasonable to feel a little annoyed. But don’t be too hard on them. Finding an affordable house with the right number of rooms in the right area at the right moment relies heavily on timing, finances and luck, and is a logistically difficult thing to pull off, even at the best of times.
When you spend a lot of time investing in any communal fantasy, whether it’s planning a holiday, a political revolution or a museum robbery, it’s easy to get swept up in idealism. But often these things don’t work out the way we planned. I’m sure if you had moved in together, there would have been plenty of unexpected dramas and irritations. But because it didn’t happen at all, you’re left mourning a ruined vision of perfection.
You ask how to move forward without letting the experience harden you or make you fearful of trusting others. But you can’t protect yourself from this kind of disappointment, because unfortunately, it’s an inevitable part of life.
If I were you, I wouldn’t think about this as “broken trust”, but rather a disappointing reality check. I don’t think your friends meant to hurt you here. You sound like a person who’s able to get things done and has the requisite follow-through. This is an amazing attribute, and it will serve you well in life. You clearly had similarly high expectations for your friends and are understandably disappointed. But young people often have grandiose ideas and a limited ability to execute them.
I know “manage your expectations” isn’t very satisfying advice to receive, especially when none of this was your fault! But I think it’s the most freeing thing you can do for yourself. Being mad at other people for being useless doesn’t make them any less useless. Sometimes friendship means holding people accountable. But sometimes it means giving people a little grace when they inevitably fuck up without meaning to, while quietly revising your expectations of their reliability, punctuality and follow-through for future reference.
It’s not that you were dumb or naive to believe this would work! But now you have a little more information than you did previously, and one of the things you have learned is that people, especially newly minted adults, have wildly different levels of “having their shit together”.
The good news is that fantasies are never wasted. Even if things didn’t work out this time around, that doesn’t mean you can’t repurpose your ideas at a later date. I would encourage you to keep the dream alive! Keep thinking about what a beautiful life looks like to you, and finding small ways to improve your living situation, even if you have to temporarily confine those ideas to the safety of your bedroom.
You’ll probably live in lots of different places and with lots of different people over the course of your life. Some will be better than others, but every experience will help you figure out what home feels like to you.
Maybe this means trying again with a different group of friends in a few years (starting with a concrete lease this time). Maybe it means trying to find a group of strangers who are amenable to your vision of paradise, and happy to try out a few things on your communal living wish list. Maybe it means saying “fuck it” and looking for a place by yourself when you’re eventually in a financial position to do so.
Don’t give up on your dream of a beautiful home, and don’t lose heart. Trying to figure out communal living situations is honestly one of the most stressful and difficult parts of young adulthood, and perhaps the best advice I can offer is that sometimes, no matter how organised or careful you are, it’s just a bit of a shitshow. Sometimes, the best you can do is make the best of a complicated and irritating situation, knowing that one day you will hopefully have a lot more control over your living arrangements.
Try to forgive your friends for being flaky idiots and hang in there! One day, you will live in a house with an unclogged shower drain and an empty kitchen sink, and it will feel like a small slice of heaven.
